Stop blaming schools for chronic absenteeism
In 2017, the federal government approved Connecticut’s new accountability plan under the latest incarnation of the federal Elementary and Secondary Education Act: the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA). ESSA replaced the No Child Left Behind Waiver accountability system, which replaced the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) law accountability system. These systems judge public school “quality” and impose sanctions on schools and districts, purportedly to improve them.
NCLB measured school quality based on standardized test scores and relied on sanctions such as school turnaround, takeover and privatization. After almost two decades under NCLB, and the acknowledgment that the metric was inaccurate and the prescriptions were ineffective, the federal government decided to try a tweaked version of its failed test andpunish regime.
The ESSA system employs multiple “indicators” of school quality. Each indicator provides schools and districts with points that together dictate what types of sanctions are imposed. The dashboard showing the schools’ and districts’ points for each indicator are also published online.
Nowhere on this dashboard is the state graded for whether or not it adequately funds Connecticut public schools, even though nationwide evidence proves a causal connection between school spending and student achievement.
One indicator under Connecticut’s ESSA plan is chronic absenteeism. The rationale Connecticut provides for including this indicator is the research and data demonstrating an association of chronic absenteeism to student academic achievement and high school graduation. What the ESSA plan does not detail are the causes of absenteeism.
A new study from Wayne State University tracks the incidence of chronic absenteeism across U.S. cities. The researchers found that nationwide, certain factors are significantly correlated with chronic absenteeism, namely: longterm population change, asthma rates, poverty and unemployment rates, residential vacancy rates, violent crime rates, average monthly temperature, and racial segregation.
Thus, although under Connecticut’s accountability system, chronic absenteeism is an indicator of school quality, and can contribute to a school or school district being subjected to increasingly draconian sanctions, none of the factors listed above that are significantly correlated with chronic absenteeism has anything to do with school.
According to the Asthma and Allergy Foundation of America, Bridgeport, New Haven and Hartford, districts with notable chronic absenteeism rates, are among the top 10 American cities in incidence of asthma.
Many of the other factors correlated with chronic absenteeism are actually created by state policy. A new report by Propublica and the Connecticut Mirror finds that Connecticut affordable housing policy creates highpoverty, segregated neighborhoods where violence and unoccupied buildings are prevalent. Among other things, Connecticut requires developers to obtain local zoning approval prior to qualifying for tax breaks for affordable housing — a practice identified as potentially discriminatory. Connecticut has the second highest concentration of affordable housing in highpoverty neighborhoods in the United States, right after Mississippi.
According to the report, Connecticut leaders are reluctant to change the housing policy that provides most of the ingredients for chronic school absenteeism. Yet they are happy to blame, shame and punish schools for the result of this unrelated state policy.
Connecticut’s approach to chronic absenteeism is an illustration of the American tendency to educationalize societal problems. We identify the problem, and even pay lip service to its root causes. A Connecticut State Department of Education guide on absenteeism recognizes that “(i) mproving student attendance is the responsibility of an entire community, not just schools.” Yet Connecticut holds only one sector in that entire community accountable for attendance — schools.
Moreover, Connecticut politicians fail to provide schools with the tools to at least mitigate the problem. The districts experiencing high rates of chronic absenteeism are the same districts that cannot afford adequate staff, such as social workers and guidance counselors, to help students address some of the conditions that affect their ability to attend school.
It’s a convenient strategy. It allows us to pretend we are addressing the challenges facing our neediest residents, and even gives us someone to blame (schools), without really ever having to expend any resources or effort to actually tackle the problems — or acknowledge the policies we put in place to create some of them.
The factors contributing to chronic absenteeism also contribute to adverse childhood experiences that affect learning in a host of negative ways. Mitigating these detrimental influences requires resources in and out of school — improving conditions in communities as well as providing academic and social support to promote successful learning. To impact our children’s academic and life outcomes, Connecticut needs to do more than show us dashboards — it needs to put some gas in the car.